Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China
By Richard Evans
Viking, 327 pages, $27.95
The life should be judged, according to a Chinese proverb, only after the coffin lid has been closed. In the case of Deng Xiaoping, 89 years old yet still the real source of power in China, the time for that judgment will soon be upon us. And with Richard Evans’ fine biography, “Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China,” we at last have a solid factual basis for making it.
Doing so will not be easy, for as Evans repeatedly stresses, Deng can seem a contradictory figure: economic liberal but political conservative, champion of markets and opponent of democracy, the man who created and sustained China’s current economic reforms yet also ordered the bloody Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Evans contends, however, that these contradictions are more apparent than real.
Western analysts tend to believe that economic and political liberalization go hand-in-hand. Deng, however, sees things differently. From the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, both of which created political chaos and economic disaster, Deng drew the lesson, according to Evans, that political stability-which to Deng means the absolute and unchallenged dictatorship of the Communist Party-is absolutely essential to the success of economic development. Hence the current face of China: political dictatorship and economic free-for-all.
How long this possibly unstable combination can last is a question about which Evans is rather upbeat. He is a career British diplomat and China specialist, posted three times to Beijing, for the first time in 1955-57, who in 1984 represented Britain in the signing of the joint declaration intended to govern the future of Hong Kong. For him, Deng is, on balance, a positive figure; remembering Deng, he writes, the great majority of Chinese “will see much more white than black, for having lifted them to a standard of life unknown, and undreamed of, by their parents and admiring him for having made their country a major international force.”
And compared to his predecessor, Mao Tse-tung, Deng undoubtedly looks very good indeed. Mao was essentially an ignoramus: His travels took him no farther than Moscow, he knew no foreign languages; thus he had no concrete understanding of what the modern world was really about and was thrown back on an unrealistic Sinocentrism that served his country badly (although within the Chinese political context, he was a master). By contrast, Deng is positively cosmopolitan: He spent five years in France during the 1920s (acquiring a life-long taste for croissants) followed by another year in the Soviet Union; in the 1970s he traveled to the United States, an experience, Evans notes, that “brought home to him more forcefully than any amount of reading how far China had to go before it could claim to be a modern country.” From these experiences came Deng’s insistence that China must compete in the modern world on international terms rather than-as Mao favored-attempting to play by special Chinese rules.
At the same time, Deng’s experiences in China persuaded him that party dictatorship was indispensable. A communist since 1924, he never took seriously the extensive discussions of constitutionalism and democracy carried on actively in China before 1949 (and that have recently come to life again). Rather, he was instrumental in imposing party dictatorship in the 1950s and was very worried when, in the 1950s and again in the 1960s, Mao (of course no democrat) tried to tap popular grievances in the service of his own political career.
Both those attempts brought disasters that, ultimately, Deng had to clean up. The Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956 released a flood of unexpectedly fundamental criticism of the Communist Party, which was rightly accused of reneging on its promises of genuine democracy and a mixed economy; the subsequent Great Leap Forward created a famine in which perhaps 20 million Chinese perished needlessly. Evans was in Beijing immediately after, from 1962-64, during which time Deng was part of a leadership that, having sidelined Mao, tried to restore a semblance of order to polity and economy. But the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1965, saw Deng and most of his colleagues driven from office and exiled or killed.
Deng was sent to a factory in Shanghai. Evans sees this “enforced sabbatical,” during which Deng read extensively while getting reacquainted with the ordinary lives of real Chinese, as the time when Deng fundamentally repudiated Mao’s key belief that, in economics, ideological mobilization could be substituted for material incentives. It also saw a stiffening in Deng’s character: In Evans’ words, he “put prevarication behind him.”
A coup d’etat after Mao’s death in 1976 began the process that returned Deng to power; four years later he was in effective charge of China (although he never held an official title commensurate with the power he exercised). And Deng’s accomplishments put those of Mao in the shade. Mao’s utopia has vanished without a trace, while Deng’s China, which for all the invocation of socialism is clearly modeled on Taiwan and Hong Kong, seems here to stay.
Nevertheless, I suspect that once the coffin is closed, the verdict on Deng will be far more negative than Evans predicts, although because of reasons that Evans discusses thoroughly. Specifically, the Tiananmen massacre has not disappeared from Chinese memory. At some point it will be investigated, and Deng’s reputation will suffer. More broadly, after Deng is gone, his sins of omission in the political sphere may well haunt China.
An economy, even a flourishing one, is not a substitute for a legitimate political system, nor is a dictatorial party. Deng has been able to discard a great deal of communist economic doctrine; history will probably judge that he should have done more to discard communist political doctrine as well, and (like Chiang Ching-kuo in Taiwan) get the transition to constitutional rule under way while he was still alive to guarantee stability. This task Deng has completely avoided. As Evans points out, he has tried and discarded a series of prime ministers, leaving at present a weak and divided leadership in Beijing, nor has he done anything to create the sorts of legitimate constitutional institutions that China requires.
Power vacuums tend to be filled by the most ruthless, as Deng seems to have recognized when, in the 1970s, he told Mao that after the chairman’s death, warlords would arise and China would sink into chaos. By removing much of the raw poverty that existed then, Deng’s economic policies have done a lot to reduce that danger, but they have not eliminated it; in the absence of a constitution, force will continue to be the ultima ratio of Chinese politics.
One suspects that Evans has a lot more to say about these issues than he does. He has long experience of China and of Beijing politics at the highest levels; the Hong Kong negotiations-scarcely mentioned-were by all accounts heated, and they must have been revealing as well. But Evans seems to be a diplomat to his fingertips, so his book-informative, carefully documented and judicious-contains only the most oblique hints as to his real opinions.
It also suffers from a certain impoverishment in its conception of what is Chinese. Evans seems to be one of those people for whom the People’s Republic defines China. But in fact, understanding Deng and the future of China are both tasks that require looking beyond the communist state and its history to other Chinese models-Taiwan (where no British diplomat of Evans’ rank has set foot for decades), Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as to China’s own pluralistic pre-1949 past. Those stories, as current trends and Deng’s own choices of policy make clear, indicate more about China’s future than does the increasingly irrelevant chronicle of Maoist politics and intra-party power struggle.
Nevertheless, “Deng Xiaoping” stands as a contribution of great importance. As a biography of contemporary China’s most influential political figure it is indispensable. And it is very much the real thing at a time when many books on China consist of little more than undocumented gossip and sensationalism. For anyone seriously interested in contemporary China, Evans is required reading.
